Boycott Loblaws & Empire!
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Meanwhile we still have people screaming about the Sunshine list in Ontario, because it stayed at $100,000 while inflation continued to rise. If it stayed true to purpose, it would be closer to $200,000 now.
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Grow your own = Insanely cheap, very easy, super delicious.
Not going to be anywhere near enough food for one person unless you have more land available for yourself than people in a city or even most modern suburban developments are likely to have. Also takes a lot of time and effort if you want more than the occasional tomato, cucumber, lettuce head or zucchini to enrich your diet a bit. (Can be fun on a small scale, though.)
Farmer’s market = Cheap, convenient, super delicious and big.variety.
Nice, but takes a lot of planning, storage and home cooking to work out. You may need to start planning your life around when the farmer’s markets are and what they carry. Also, the variety is necessarily limited to what farmers in your area are growing.
Friends with chickens = Delicious high quality free eggs offloaded onto you every week.
Cool if you got those, but most people don’t.
Not going to be anywhere near enough food for one person unless you have more land available for yourself than people in a city or even most modern suburban developments are likely to have.
i did a study on area needed for food production a while ago, and IIRC
- per person, about 1000 m² are needed to feed them. depends a bit on where you live though
- fertile land produces around 3.5 t of grains /ha on average. with modern technology, the peak is 7.5 t/ha
- by far the most area is needed to grow calorie-heavy foods. like, you could get far with 30 m² for yourself if you only plant vegetables and buy the grains at the supermarket
- grains are really cheap, compared to vegetables. that’s because vegetables are labor-intensive (difficult to automate because they’re often fragile and sensitive) while grains can be automated on ultra-large-scale farms with farming machines, so they’re really cheap.
Note: 1 t = 1000 kg, grains = cereals
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This is the way, though.
Grow your own = Insanely cheap, very easy, super delicious.
Farmer’s market = Cheap, convenient, super delicious and big.variety.
Friends with chickens = Delicious high quality free eggs offloaded onto you every week.
Grocery store = Low quality crap; twice the price. An unpleasant experience of other miserable people and awful music. A chore of a thing to do. The whole layout trying to be themed like a fancy farmer’s market but you can’t even find the plum vinegar!
Farmers markets have never been cheaper where I live. Fresher maybe, but as expensive or more expensive than supermarket produce.
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A bag like that at SuperStore (Canada) for us is around $50, but if I go to the smaller chain (Fruiticana) its like $18… I’m always stunned and think they forgot to scan some items
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Valid concerns. I won’t ignore the orphan crushing machine and every situation is different, but a lot of food can be grown in an apartment.
I had a 300sqft bachelor pad in Vancouver where I managed to grow tomatoes, goji berries, greens and ALL the herbs. I kept my herbs in pots under a full spectrum light indoors, clipping and drying as they grew out. After set-up I only had to water, fertilize sometimes, and prune as needed. Greens, I kept harvesting young and re-seeding. Aside from watering, it took almost no effort to put a significant dent in my grocery bill.
Now, I have a 4x8ft fenced garden in a shared yard where I grow so much I barely buy produce in the summer. Aside from weeding, sprouting and transplanting in the spring, the main labour is watering, which only takes like five minutes. I get my seeds from things I eat or the public library seed share, so those are free, too.
I legit grew three pumpkins, four ziplock bags of sunflower seeds, beets, snap peas, opium poppies, carrots, tomatoes, gooseberries, strawberries and still have a herb shelf inside.
I get that’s still not a year’s worth a food, but it’s a lot for tiny bit of dirt, considering I knew nothing about gardening before.
Oh but get GMO pumpkin seeds. White mildew rot is a pain in the ass and everywhere. And a dehydrator if you don’t know how to deal with lots of food at once, you can make chips and crackers out of anything.
I’m pretty lucky in that my friends hunt, too, so I get a butt load of deer meat every fall.
Yeah. I don’t have large space, but grow my winter and my summer vegetables, then obviously herbs. Plenty for two people. All I need to do is get meat.
Literally about to have a meal now and it’ll be eggs benedict on toast with spinach and mushrooms. Only thing not from the yard or friends is the bread.
Or I could go down the road and get the same meal, shittier, for $20.
Edit: Didn’t even use the bread. Decided to go omlette. But I did slot some sliced ham in there which was also store bought.
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So envious of all of you that have cheap farmer’s markets. Where I am, my choices are
- Grocery store: cheap, highly variable quality, support the conglomerates
- Farmer’s market: expensive, probably higher quality, support local farmers
They’re so much fun to walk through though. If only I could actually afford to buy from them.
All I can guess is our farmers haven’t been given any initiative to sell to a middle man (store) that marks up. In essence, a farmer’s market is supposed to be like going directly to the manufacturer and telling the retailer to fuck off. The farmer is happy, I’m happy, it works.
If your farmer’s markets are expensive, I’m guessing it may be novelty or hobbiest produce out to make a quick buck of a trend.
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Yeah. I don’t have large space, but grow my winter and my summer vegetables, then obviously herbs. Plenty for two people. All I need to do is get meat.
Literally about to have a meal now and it’ll be eggs benedict on toast with spinach and mushrooms. Only thing not from the yard or friends is the bread.
Or I could go down the road and get the same meal, shittier, for $20.
Edit: Didn’t even use the bread. Decided to go omlette. But I did slot some sliced ham in there which was also store bought.
Sounds fantastic. Foraged mushrooms are the best. I feel the same way about going out for food unless it’s something difficult or expensive to make on my own. That said, one of my favorite meals is a bowl of peas.
I’ve sent city hall and my mp an obnoxious amount of e-mails about allowing urban chickens here. When they get their heads out of their asses and shut down the bylaw I’ll have a coop built before the ink dries.
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I’m genuinely curious: have you looked into co ops in your area? Some deliver!
The only ones I know of locally are those red-branded “Co-op” stores, but where I’m at they’re all gas stations with only convenience stores so everything is 1.5-2x a grocery store. Google couldn’t find me anything either.
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Meanwhile we still have people screaming about the Sunshine list in Ontario, because it stayed at $100,000 while inflation continued to rise. If it stayed true to purpose, it would be closer to $200,000 now.
All public salaries should be public. I disagree that fixing the cutoff causes it to diverge from it’s “true purpose”. IMO it actually gets closer to that purpose every year.
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Farmers markets have never been cheaper where I live. Fresher maybe, but as expensive or more expensive than supermarket produce.
That’s absurd. Produce is a fraction of the price at the market, and it’s still better quality after sitting in your fridge for a week. Raise some hell
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All public salaries should be public. I disagree that fixing the cutoff causes it to diverge from it’s “true purpose”. IMO it actually gets closer to that purpose every year.
Why not make ALL salaries public regardless of if they’re private or public sector? Imagine the fun you could have with that kind of data
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That problem has a track record from even deeper than the 3-firm collusive oligopoly of distribution. In fact, in the 1970s the Government of Quebec unilaterally decreed criminal charges beyond arbitrary and Pareto-inefficient quota limits of production and sale by a centralist system of ‘licenses’, a result of colluding of the 1922-born Union des Cultivateurs Catholiques (UCC) of Quebec and the Government of Quebec. Under the guise of “management of supply”, those terrorists have made production and sale of agricultural products under Quebec law a criminal offence, and skyrocketed prices of daily basic human needs of food. Example, still in 2025, the Government of Quebec has threatened criminal charges, i.e. penalties, incarceration, and ultimately use of lethal force, on any production and sale of chicken beyond the 22 chicken production licenses total, 12 eggs production licenses total, $24 000 + per cow production licenses, and 3 slaughterhouses total, on the vast expanse of land more vast than Europe under military rule of the fascist racist capitalist selling-the-country(including-their-own-mother)-to-rich-foreigners ‘government’ of Quebec.
Ahh, the smell of food riots in the morning of the 2020’s. Does not seem to have changed much since the 19th century.
About that, a few recommended readings:
“The Conquest of Bread” - Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin “The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time” - Karl Polanyi “The Hidden Repression of the IMF” - Alex Gladstein “La Ferme Impossible” - Dominic Lamontagne “Mutual Aid: a Factor of Evolution” - Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin
In parallel, astute observers of economics and politics of Quebec and Canada have likely noted a similar problem about a similar unilateral decree of ‘licenses’ of production and sales. In opposition of the Canadian parliamentary federation unilateral decree law of 2017, by which cultivation of cannabis has legal standing up to 4 plants per household, the aforementioned government of Quebec has produced a racket of collusive monopoly, breaking entering and gunpoint robbing self-medication peasants, farmers, students, professors, moms, dads, aunties, uncles, etc. with one hand, and selling ‘licenses’ of prodcution and sales in highest-bidder-auction-even-if-you-sang-self-incrimination-about-’187’ing-cops-of-partner-nations-on-multi-million-sales-music-records with another hand.
“Oh, well just apply for a license!” => minimum investment required, a large production facility (e.g. warehouse), i.e. approx. $100k pre-application, then bribe a lottery type attribution system to actually get the Government of Quebec approval to grow therapeutic food plants, sell them, and if you produce more in contravention of the limits the Government approved of you (e.g. CannTrust), you just get a minor $ penalty, in comparison with the productive people producing outside of that dump of officepaperwork waste of natural resources.
In another parallel, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), from the comforts of offices in gomorrah Washington D.C., has an extensive record of lending active genociders trillions of US$ on conditions of ecocidal and inefficient mono-cultures very similar of the gunpoint-slave-labor plantations of the style of Charles Tait of the 1700s.
The bad parts of capitalism and centralist state communism, with scarce democracy in sight beyond words under attack from stacks of dirty paper and gold in shell-corporation hideouts of the style of Panama, Luxembourg, and Fort Knox, Texas.
Welcome to Canada Ey! Bonjour, Hi, and Bye!
Prescription:
Anarchism yesterday, today, as long as needed. Of, for, by local people.
Replacing pigs in sties and maggots in rot.
Since the needs arose, until the needs subside and fade away.
For human rights, for health.
Peace.
Happy Farming
Sincerely,
One of numerous mountain bears.
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You’re welcome. We are upset with the USA, not Americans.
The Orange menace and his cult.
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That’s absurd. Produce is a fraction of the price at the market, and it’s still better quality after sitting in your fridge for a week. Raise some hell
Not where I live. It’s much more expensive.
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The Orange menace and his cult.
Let’s be real, even if the dems come back into power that’s not going to magically heal everything.
